Two days ago, I spoke with an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran and the deaths of over a hundred and sixty girls and staff at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. My interlocutor dismissed those deaths as unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage, serving the cause of the greater good. I had heard the phrase before. Last June, I watched Benny Morris, a historian whose rigor and courage in examining modern Israeli history I had long admired, speak publicly about Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza. He used the same words, delivered with the same calm detachment. What remained with me was not his statement but how effortlessly it arrived and how little it cost him to say it.

War has traditionally been described as an instrument of rational policy, a continuation of diplomacy. Strategic planning, operational doctrine, and legal regulation all presuppose that military violence can be directed by intention, rational calculus, and smart modern technology. But how does this correspond to the actual phenomenology of war?  Over two hundred years ago, Clausewitz introduced the concept of friction to describe the pervasive discrepancy between war as it is planned and war as it actually unfolds. Friction arises from the countless contingencies that constitute combat: miscommunication, human error, imperfect intelligence, logistical failures, weather, and the unpredictable reactions of the enemy. These forces are the dynamic environment of war, which transforms even the simplest operation once it enters the field of action. Once friction is understood as a permanent feature of war, the boundary between the planned and the unplanned begins to dissolve. What is intended and what emerges accidentally become intertwined within the same unfolding process, until the distinction between them is a matter of legal classification rather than operational reality.

War, in this sense, follows a logic closer to chaos than to rational design. It reveals a disturbing aspect of human reality: the attempt to control violence through rational design continually encounters forces that resist such control. Organized chaos is a contradiction in terms, and war lives inside that contradiction. There is an older vocabulary for this domain. In the language of Kabbalah, Sitra Achra, literally “the other side”, designates the realm of impurity, excess, and distortion, in which meaning dissolves and destructive forces prey on its residues. War, in this reading, is the passage into Sitra Achra: the moment at which the categories designed to regulate violence enter a field whose dynamics continuously exceed them. Strategic strikes, misdirected weapons, destroyed infrastructure, systemic civilian casualties: all arise from the same operational environment. They are different expressions of the same dynamic process. The distinction between them belongs to the language of courts, briefings, and moral philosophy. Within Sitra Achra, that distinction is real as a normative aspiration and unstable as a description of what actually occurs. The concept functions as a semiotic figure for the field in which the limits of human control over organized violence become visible. It identifies the point at which the moral language of war encounters something it cannot fully domesticate, the field in which violence propagates through technological, logistical, and social systems whose consequences exceed the intentions that set them in motion. War, then, is the revelation of Sitra Achra within political reality. The structures designed to govern violence operate within a symbolic order of intention and responsibility, while the violence they attempt to regulate emerges from a field far less stable. This is the disturbing aspect of modern warfare that no legal framework has been able to resolve, and perhaps cannot resolve, because the problem is ontological rather than ethical: intention initiates war but loses governing power once violence enters the chaotic field of action.

There is also a psychological dimension to Sitra Achra that structural analysis alone cannot reach. War has a carnivalesque dimension. It does not merely release violence from the constraints of intention; it releases men from the identities that peacetime imposes on them. The pilot who bombs a police station or a housing complex, who moves through destruction with something that is recognizable, if one is honest, as exhilaration, is the same man who, six months earlier, drove his children to school and complained about the weather to his wife. War suspends that identity and issues another in its place. The suspension is not incidental to the institution of war — it is one of its constitutive features. War is the moment when a society collectively lifts its prohibitions, and the individual is temporarily relieved of the self that ordinary life requires. What is pathological in peacetime becomes permissible but celebrated. To kill, to burn, to destroy with one’s own hands: these acts, which in civilian life would require years of psychiatric explanation, are in war the basis of medals. The transformation is institutional. The state licenses violence; it invites a particular form of enjoyment that it elsewhere criminalizes.

This is what the moral language of warfare works hardest to suppress. Collateral damage presupposes a reluctant technician, a man who aimed at one thing and, regrettably, struck another. An administrator of the accidental. The entire legal and ethical architecture of modern warfare is built on this figure. Yet the historical record is less tidy. War has always produced men who enjoy what they are doing. This enjoyment is something the institution enables and then needs to manage afterward. This is where Sitra Achra and the carnival of war converge. Sitra Achra is the field in which the symbolic order of intention and accountability loses its governing power. The carnival of war is the psychological experience of that loss, the felt liberation from the constraints of peacetime identity. Together, they describe a domain in which destruction is not always unintended, and the language of collateral damage is invoked to encompass both the chaos and the pleasure the chaos releases. It is asked to account for the bomb that went astray and also, more quietly, for the fire that was set deliberately and gleefully.

The troubling suspicion the carnival framework raises is that precision and proportionality are the story told over a field of violence that has already exceeded them, a field in which something has been released that cannot be recalled, and that the perpetrators would rather not name directly. This is precisely the problem that “collateral damage” was invented to solve, or rather, to manage. The term entered American military discourse in 1961, in a paper by nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling titled “Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage.” Schelling used it to describe unintended harm to civilian areas resulting from strikes on strategic targets. It was subsequently absorbed into U.S. Department of Defense documentation, where it was defined as unintentional or incidental injury to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets, with the addendum that such damage is lawful provided it is not excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. The genealogy “collateral damage” is instructive. The concept echoes the medieval Catholic Doctrine of Double Effect: an action may be morally permissible if the act itself is not evil, the harmful effect is not intended, and there is proportionality between good and harm. Collateral damage is this doctrine rendered into administrative discourse, stripped of its theological underpinnings, and issued as a bureaucratic classification. It provides the language of moral intention for a domain where intention has already lost its governing authority.

That is the central function of the concept, and also its central dishonesty. It attempts to reimpose the symbolic order of intention and accountability upon a field of violence that Clausewitz and the reality of modern warfare have already shown to be ungovernable by such categories.  In practice, the concept does something more specific and more troubling: it renders the lives of all those killed “by accident”, peripheral to the moral imagination, reducing them to semantic residue. Their deaths are framed as regrettable background to Israel’s struggle against its adversaries, the Russian war on Ukraine, or the US’s management of the regional order. They are not mourned as ends in themselves. They are accounted for, briefly, and then forgotten.

The mechanism operates through a hierarchy of civilizational proximity, an implicit distinction of whose deaths belong to the moral universe of the West and whose do not. The organizing principle is religious and cultural affiliation, the prior assignment of a population to one side or the other of the line the West draws between civilization and its adversaries. Once a population has been placed on the enemy side of that line, or in the ambiguous category of those who harbor enemies, their deaths carry a different moral weight. Collateral damage is the bureaucratic language for managing the deaths of people who were already, by prior classification, on the wrong side. It sorts the dead into the grievable and the statistical, establishing a hierarchy of whose deaths require accounting and whose may be aggregated and approximated. Israeli deaths appear in news reports with names, ages, and personal histories. Iranian deaths, when tallied at all, arrive as numbers. When a Western broadcaster describes over a hundred and sixty girls killed in Minab as collateral damage, what is being communicated, quietly and politely, is that these lives occupied a different category of humanity from the outset. They were incidental lives, extinguished through procedure rather than malice. The distinction, intended to preserve moral seriousness, ends by evacuating it. The question it poses is of ontological order: who is permitted to be a victim, and who vanishes. Some deaths rupture the world while others leave no mark, like rubble cleared from a site where a building stood that was already, in some implicit calculation, considered expendable. The concept administers this inequality with the neutrality of a technical term. It drapes the decision to kill in the language of military necessity, converting an ethical choice into an operational outcome.

Since its inception in the early 1960s, the term “collateral damage” has dissolved so thoroughly into the stream of evening news, press releases, military briefings, and policy papers that its origin in death is easy to forget. We forget that it was designed to forestall moral judgment, to shield power from indignation and its wielders from legal consequence. It performs a final act of erasure: it removes the dead from moral discourse entirely. The victims are killed twice, first by the bomb, and then by the language that renders their deaths without weight. Primo Levi observed of the logic of the camps that the ultimate ambition was not merely to kill but to make it as though the killed had never existed. Collateral damage works toward the same end by different means, and with considerably greater institutional respectability.

Benny Morris is an eloquent man, a great scholar, thoughtful in other respects, and clearly not unkind. That is what stayed with me. The term “collateral damage” requires no cruelty in the person who uses it. It requires only habit and the willingness to accept that certain deaths need not disturb one’s morning. The Sitra Achra is not far from us. It is on the other side of the language we have agreed to use. As for Schelling, who introduced the term, he went on to become one of the most influential American strategic thinkers of the twentieth century. He died at the age of ninety-five, well-regarded and at peace. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis…”

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